Letter: Oak Ridger debates gun access, suicide link

Thursday

Feb 7, 2013 at 8:13 PMFeb 7, 2013 at 8:15 PM

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following letter was handed to state Rep. John Ragan during this month’s “Breakfast with the Legislators.” It is the latest of several letters sent back and forth recently between Bill and Elaine Culbert of Oak Ridge and state Rep. Ragan, who also lives in Oak Ridge.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following letter was handed to state Rep. John Ragan during this month’s “Breakfast with the Legislators.” It is the latest of several letters sent back and forth recently between Bill and Elaine Culbert of Oak Ridge and state Rep. Ragan, who also lives in Oak Ridge.

Dear Rep. Ragan,

I read your analysis of my husband’s gun legislation letter with interest. You assert that suicide statistics published by Australian authorities show that overall suicide rates in the last two years are the highest in 30 years and that other forms of violent crime are increasing, and that guns make no difference in suicide completion. I have found no credible evidence to support your data.

The Australian Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, the Australian Institute of Criminology, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics all agree these rates are stable or decreasing. The relationship between rapid access to a gun and the suicide rate was seen clearly in Australia when a 28-day waiting period for gun purchases was enacted. Where do you get your information?

My husband did not invent the gun death statistics that he used. You wrote that it is completely impossible to verify outside of unscientific opinion these assertions:

• People who use a firearm to defend against an assault are far more likely to be injured or killed;

• A gun in the home at least doubles the risk of murder or suicide;

• Living in a state with the highest rates of gun ownership per household, makes women and children seven times more likely to die in a gun accident;

• Women in the U.S. are 11 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in 25 other rich nations; and

• Murder rates involving guns are 20 times higher in the U.S. than in 22 other rich countries.

Those statistics are based on research from The National Academy of Sciences, the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal Trauma, American Journal of Public Health, JAMA, Injury Prevention, the Centers For Disease Control, Gallup, the National Institutes of Health, The World Health Organization, and U.S. Department of Justice. Do you think there is a huge conspiracy among these groups, or that they are unfamiliar with scientific theory?

Any well-designed, population-based study will have a study cohort as well as a demographically similar control cohort. Negative events can be established just as well as positive events with the same level of scientific certainty. It seems that you have more of an issue with scientific theory.

Our very own James E. Bailey, M.D., professor of medicine at UT Health Science Center, is the lead author of a watershed study that established the health risks to women who have guns in the home. His was a large population-based control study. Randomly selected control subjects were matched to the victims by neighborhood, sex, race and age range. According to Dr. Bailey, having a gun in the home triples a woman’s likelihood of being murdered with a gun.

You wrote that women in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas are several times more likely to be struck by lightning than women in other rich nations — then asked, “Should we have public policy to ban women living in these states?” Seriously? Or that 380 percent more people are killed in automobiles than in gun deaths — so should public policy ban automobiles?

The idea of comparing deaths from automobile crashes and guns seems specious. The utility of cars is immense and represents the very cornerstone of our industrial economy. To do without them, would leave us in a society like that of Chad. Accordingly, we must tolerate some risk. We do this grudgingly with highly regulated use as we continue to make them safer and safer. Soon, sensors on all automobiles will prevent almost all fatalities.

Semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, on the other hand, have little utility in the hands of the civilian population. Are you saying that we should be willing to tolerate the same number of deaths for the two practices? Each year, 30,000 gun deaths occur in the U.S.; 40 percent are homicides. An additional 70,000 gunshot wounds require emergency department visits. The financial cost is $100 billion. Why would a society tolerate this so civilians can have handguns and assault rifles?

While mental illness does play a role in suicide, there is no higher rate of gun homicide committed by the mentally ill than found in the general population. There is a stronger relationship between these types of murders and those individuals who have a history of anger, violence, and own a gun.

Otherwise law-abiding individuals with no history of mental illness commit a good percentage of gun homicides. They become angry in a domestic dispute and kill their girlfriend or wife facilitated by the presence of the gun. Tennessee is about third in the nation for this type of crime; these individuals are not identifiable on background checks.

Trying to establish policy based on your false assumption about the mentally ill victimizes a great many innocent people by engaging them in the mental health and legal arenas for merely making some innocuous off-hand comment that some lay person interprets as a sign of mental illness.

The U.S. has more gun homicides than the 20-plus richest nations combined. Are you implying this is because there is more than 20 times the number of mentally ill Americans per capita than in other rich nations? How can you assume this despite the preponderance of evidence that says otherwise?

Isn’t it more reasonable to think there is some relationship between the U.S. being the far outlier in gun homicides among rich nations and the fact that Americans own between 35 percent and half of the world’s guns?

You claim that women are murdered because they are involved with criminal activities. You describe these as living in ghettos, receiving welfare, working as prostitutes, using drugs and being involved with gangs. Do you consider living in a ghetto and receiving welfare to be criminal activities? Murders of passion often cut across many of these lines.

How do you account for murdered children? In 2002, there were no gun fatalities among children in gun-scarce Japan and there were 19 in Great Britain. In the U.S., there were over 5,200. Between 1979 and

2001, 90,000 children under the age of 15 were killed with guns in the U.S. This is 12 times higher than 25 industrial nations combined. Surely they were not all involved in criminal activity.

You claim that Chicago, despite its gun laws has a high gun homicide rate. Unless you have a federal policy, isn’t it like trying to control a drop of water in an ocean?

If you want to know who gun victims are, please visit this Slate.com web site and search for “gun deaths since Newtown” or the Twitter feed @GunDeaths. It is a chronological listing of all gun deaths in the U.S. since Newtown. Select one of the man, woman or child icons and you will see the person behind the statistic: the name, age, location, and the news story about this gun death victim.